Cryptic puzzles and a interestingly titled novel

 This is just a post to keep this blog alive. I'm enjoying the puzzles in The New York Times. My friends and I share our results. 

Here in Melbourne we have a new newsletter each week about words and puzzling, and it has introduced me to many more of the intricacies of Cryptic Puzzling. 

Recently a novel was mentioned in that newsletter - The Cryptic Clue. How could I refuse the chance to read a book with a title like that?

It was a good read. I'd certainly recommend it.

Maundy and maun

 At church on the Thursday night before Easter, I was most interested to hear in the homily that the older name for that day is 'Maundy Thursday'. We generally call it 'Holy Thursday'. 

The priest said that the older meaning was that Christ gave us a 'mandate' to love one another and serve each other humbly - as he demonstrated in washing the the feet of his followers. Sure, when I looked around the internet, the same definition popped up.

A Scottish word then occurred to me - maun. When I looked up the meaning, there is was: Maun means must.

the origin of the word grotesque

 Since the advent of the Corona virus and all the subsequent problems, I don't yet feel like travelling. However, one of the places I would one day like to see is the Domus Aurea of Nero in Rome.

I was reminded of it today, when I received my regular text from Delanceyplace.com. This email consists of excerpts from books, and today's was from Haunted, by Leo Braudy. It was a discussion of  the origin of the word grotesque, which comes from the Italian word grotto, meaning  a cave.

 Here is a little quote from today's Delanceyplace excerpt.

In the late fifteenth century, Raphael Sanzio, more remembered as a great painter, who was then head of antiquities for Rome as well as the chief architect of the Vatican, supervised the partial excavation of Nero's Domus Aurea (Golden House), which had recently been discovered to exist under what was other­wise assumed to be a natural hill near the Colosseum. The site had been dis­covered in the course of digging a well there, when workmen broke through what was found to be the dome of an enormous room. Lowered down on ropes to explore this vast underground construction, they discovered a series of equally large rooms on whose walls were paintings of mingled human and animal forms fantastically tangled with vegetation, fruits, and flowers that were dubbed grottesca -- the kind of visual images to be found in grottoes.

It would  be fabulous to tour the partially restored building and wear virtual reality equipment to experience it the way it originally was. Maybe one day I'll get there. In the meantime, here are a couple of sites that give an idea of what that tour might be like. 

This one is in German. 

Here's another one in English. I think this site is worth a visit, because it explains a little of why the place  disappeared from history after Nero died.

the benefits of research in a second language

 It has been a long time since I put anything new here. I'll just write a quick post to keep the blog alive. 

At the beginning of the long lockdowns here in Victoria, Australia, I, like many others, was looking for some intellectual stimulation to help me deal with the stress.

It occurred to me to take up my study of German again, after many decades of not reading or speaking the language. 

I was very lucky to come across a great class run by the CAE here in Melbourne - German language online.

At first, to me it was a matter of learning the language, then after a while it became learning in that language, and finally I've arrived at the stage where it's learning about things in the new language.

This ability to discover information in German has opened up many new doors for me. For instance, recently my dog Peppa had a grass seed in her foot. (Major bother and major expense.) When I went to the vet today for what I hope is the final check-up on her recovery, he told me how grass seeds drill into the flesh of dogs, and are formed in such a way that they resist being pulled out.

I felt quite pleased to say that I'd read about this recently on a German website. I'd visited lots of blogs and webpages about the problem, as any concerned dog owner would, but that specific piece about the structure of grass had been in German. 

I'd taken notice of it because I was looking for the translation of the word Grannen on the German site: the word means awn in English. Wikipedia has a rather scary explanation of how the awns of wild emmer wheat bury themselves in the soil. I'd better not go down that rabbit hole, or I'll never take my dog to a grassy area again. Here's hoping the grasses around here are less active. 

Knowing German is great fun, because there's so much of the internet to explore.

what a rigmarole!

 I was visiting a blog called Misadventures of Widowhood and wanted to comment. In one of those mysterious internetty-occurrences, I had to sign out of Blogger in order to make my comment and I wrote about the rigmarole involved. 

Well, I had thought I was going to use that term, but after trying rigamarole, rigmorale, rigmorole, I had to admit to myself that I didn't know how to spell this word. 

It's one of those words that you say and think you know, but in the end have little idea of its origin. For me, knowing the history of a word helps the spelling stick in my head. So I visited Mental Floss to see what I could discover.

I enjoyed reading that site's take on the history of the word.

A visit to en-academic.com gives lots of definitions and histories for the term. 

Hopefully, after writing this post I might remember how to spell it.

a frantic start to 2022

 I titled this post as if I'm frantically running around on the first day of 2022, but obviously I'm actually sitting at my computer doing nothing special. 

However, seeing it's a new year, I thought I'd like to resume writing posts - perhaps only occasionally. 

As my new puppy was racing past after pinching yet another sock from the dirty clothes basket, she seemed rather frenetic. And then I wondered if that's the same as being frantic.

It seems the two words come from the same historical roots, with the underlying concept of a mind gone mad. Well, in human terms stealing items of clothing and chewing on them might seem crazy, but I'll  bet to a puppy it makes sense.

I think the concept of 'affected by wild excitement' might fit the bill.

I enjoyed reading this blog post.

 I noticed a sign locally saying 'Mercedes Benz' and wondered if there would be any connection in the 'Benz' part with the word 'benzine'. A quick search of The Online Etymology Dictionary came up with the word spelled as 'benzene', but as having been coined by the chemist  Eilhardt Mitscherlich as 'Benzin'. He had obtained it from a distillation of benzoic acid.

On Quora there's a reliable-looking answer that says benzine is the obsolete spelling of benzene. However, the Macquarie Australian dictionary has it with both spellings.

I'm feeling a bit silly about this, because I actually thought benzine was another word for petrol (gas, in the US). At least I now know the word has no connection to Mercedes Benz and it means:

a colourless, volatile, flammable, liquid, aromatic hydrocarbon, C₆H₆, obtained chiefly from coal tar, and used as a solvent and in chemical synthesis. (Definition from The Macquarie  Dictionary)

But it still lurks in my subconscious that there's some connection, given that the German word for ''the petrol' is  'das Benzin'. Well, at least this should help me remember the gender of that word - neuter. I always find it tricky to remember what gender German nouns are. 

Just a jiffy

This morning, on ABC Radio Melbourne, the presenter was having fun with 'useless facts'. I love useless information, because it's never actually useless.

They talked about the word jiffy. It turns out that this term has a couple of specific meanings, apart from its handiness in referring to an indeterminate short period of time. I looked around on the Net and found this link to its meaning in physics, chemistry and computer science.

I've arrived at the stage of life where there's not much room in my brain for new information, so I'll leave it to you to follow the link and discover this not-useless fact.

It's believed the word has been in use since at least the late eighteenth century.  The English Language and Usage site quotes it in a text from 1780. The lengthy discussion on the site also mentions the variant jiffin from 1767.

The Phrase Finder says the coiner of the word jiffy did not refer to a specific item that epitomised quickness, but to me this seems strange. There's never a totally random nature to the coining of a new word. I notice that in the examples given of idioms of similes that do refer to an existing item that was known to be speedy, one is 'as fast as greased lightning.'

This gels with what was said on The English Language and Usage site - that jiffy was originally a thieves' cant term for lightning.

It beats me why thieves would have needed a secret word for lightning. But that's language for you - interesting and mysterious.

New Year, new post

First post of 2020 - hopefully not the only one!

Many months ago, a bothersome sales rep managed to corral me into listening to his spiel about a body lotion, and the small sachet he gave me as a sample has been sitting on my chest of drawers, waiting for me to use it. (I'm not going to waste it, because I'm a fanatic about making use of all the world's resources, even a three-centimetre square packet of body lotion.)

Today I noticed the wording on it:

My decades-old schoolgirl French suggested that the word Lavande has something to do with washing, so I looked up the origin of lavender at The Online Etymology Dictionary.

Sure enough, I had remembered correctly (reassuring, at my age, to know my memory still works).

Here's what it said:

lavender (n.)"fragrant plant of the mint family," c. 1300, from Anglo-French lavendre, Old French lavendre, "the lavender plant," from Medieval Latin lavendula "lavender" (10c.), perhaps from Latin lividus "bluish, livid". [This was followed by a  referral to a link for the word livid,  in relation to whether livid means purple-colored or pale-colored.]  If so it probably was associated with French lavande, Italian lavanda "a washing" (from Latin lavare "to wash;" from PIE root *leue- "to wash") because it was used to scent washed fabrics and as a bath perfume.

So far, interesting, but nothing I hadn't expected. However, the next bit fascinated me: 

The adjective meaning "of a pale purple color, of the color of lavender flowers" is from 1840; as a noun in the color sense from 1882. An identical Middle English word meant "laundress, washerwoman;" also, apparently, "prostitute, whore; camp follower" and is attested as a surname from early 13c.

So, the usual disparity in use of language for female activities compared to male ones. 

And I had to spare a thought for those women who followed medieval armies. Not only did they have to provide sexual favours to their 'protectors', but had to wash the soldiers' dirty clothes too!

The Grammarphobia blog has a discussion of this word also, and it's a great read. In part, it says:

But no, the obsolete “lavender” that means a washerwoman is probably not related to the other “lavender,” the plant that produces the fragrant pale-purple flowers.
The botanical word “lavender” (later also used for the scent and the color) came into English before 1300 from Anglo-Norman and Old French (lavandre), the OED says. The original source was a medieval Latin word for the plant, first spelled livendula (or perhaps lividula), and later lavendula. As the OED explains, some etymologists think the ultimate source may be the classical Latin adjective lividus (bluish, livid).
If so, the two “lavenders” aren’t etymologically connected, though they later became associated because of the use of lavender perfumes, oils, and dried flowers in caring for linens.

I came across an article called 'Sex and the Soldier in Lancastrian Normandy, 1415 to 1450,' with lots of information about attitudes towards women who travelled with armies, and although I didn't resolve my confusion about the etymology of the two words, I enjoyed reading it. 

Surprising origin of the word grotesque

Sitting in the waiting room at my doctor's surgery, I read an article in an old edition of National Geographic and was surprised to learn the origin of the word grotesque.

The article was a revisiting of the life and achievements of the emperor Nero, a bad guy by anyone's measure, but apparently a man with an artistic vision that resulted in an amazing palace, one largely open for the common people to stroll around the grounds.

He built a huge palace that took up a large portion of the Roman city (land available because of the infamous fire that he may or may not have instigated.)

Subsequent emperors appear to have hated Nero so much that they literally buried Nero's palace. One report said some areas were filled with sand, which is why the interior was preserved so well, at least until the fifteenth century.

For fifteenth century artists, it was a popular pilgrimage to be lowered into the cave-like interior of the buried palace to look at the frescoes on the ceilings. Apparently the fill of rubble meant that these early visitors were standing up near the ceiling, and could touch the painted surfaces.

They were so taken with the paintings that they reproduced many of the motifs of these grotesque (i e from a cave or grotto) artworks in their own work. I guess if we did our homework we could figure out where to see them, probably some in the Vatican, I suppose.

The Online Etymology Dictionary writes that this suggested origin of the word grotesque is generally accepted.

Here are a few links that I've just enjoyed looking at.

Rome Reports.com 

The History Channel

Kobean History

opposite of widdershins

A friend and I  were sharing a nice pot of tea in a new teashop in Ivanhoe today and she made sure to turn the teapot a few times before pouring the first cup. We both agreed it's traditional to turn the pot widdershins.

In preparing this post, I had a quick look around the internet and came across a hilarious conversation on reddit about pot-turning. Here's one of the comments (obviously tongue-in-cheek):

It's well-known that the tea plant absorbs minerals into the leaf as it gets more mature, thus the higher amount of fluoride in mature leaf as opposed to young buds. High quality tea is often made from the leaf of very old plants, which have absorbed many of the minerals from the soil.
Some of those are ancient ferrous minerals. This means that the dried tea leaf is slightly magnetic. When the water is initially added, the leaf is jumbled every which way. However with the turning of the pot, it allows the ferrous minerals in the leaf to align with the magnetic pole, much like a simple compass made of a magnetized needle on top of a floating cork.
Once the tea leaf is aligned magnetically, the tea itself becomes much more harmonious with nature. You don't want to be drinking tea where it's magnetically pointing every which way as it goes into your stomach! If the earth's magnetic poles were to suddenly flip (which it is due to do any century now) it could result in the tea in your stomach also flipping, causing mild indigestion.
And that is why you rotate the pots.

I'll admit that, although we had our traditional-old-fashioned-tea-drinker hats on, I did pull out my mobile phone so we could check the opposite of widdershins.
My friend thought it was something like diesel.

She was correct in general about the word, but there were different spellings —deosil, deasil, deiseil, to name a few.

Here's a discussion about these two words. If you're like me, it will leave your mind whirling, but when the tealeaves-of-information settle to the bottom of the pot, you'll perhaps know why my mother told me to always turn the pot widdershins before pouring.

I'll admit I'm none the wiser.

But it was a lovely cuppa in a nice shop, with ribbon sandwiches, good company and a delicious glass of trifle to finish.

nurses nourish us

Recently on FaceBook I came across an advertisement promoting respect for the profession of nursing. Hilarious, but with a serious message.

I was reminded of that advertisement when I came across the word nurstle on a site where you can get help in solving crossword puzzles. The meaning was given as: 'Nurstle, to nurse. See noursle.' Noursle was defined as 'To nurse; to rear; to bring up.' 

That second spelling seemed to relate to nourishment, so I looked for the word nurse on the Online Etymology Dictionary

And yes, there it was, the origin of a role we accept as vitally important in our modern world, but don't stop to think about.

Nurses nourish us.

It seems the word comes to us from as early as the twelfth-century, in the sense of a wet-nurse.

12c., nurrice, "wet-nurse, foster-mother to a young child" (modern form from late 14c.), from Old French norrice "foster-mother, wet-nurse, nanny" (source of proper name Norris), from Late Latin*nutricia, "nurse, governess, tutoress," noun use of fem. nutricius"that suckles, nourishes," from nutrix (genitive nutricis) "wet-nurse, "from nutrire "to suckle" (see nourish). Meaning "person who takes care of sick" in English first recorded 1580s.

When the link to nourish is followed, similar root words appear.

And, then to my joy, I read that nursle is a frequentative of nurse.

Frequentative? I'd not previously come across this wonderful type of English verb. But that's a story another day.

I think I'm in love with frequentative verbs.

Trying to think like a cryptic puzzler

Having recently immersed myself in David Astle's book Rewording the Brain, I keep noticing the intricacies of words as I see or hear them.

Just for my own enjoyment I'm going to keep a list here of ideas that pop into my head. I'm intending to come back to this post and add to it.

So...
prancer - Topless dancer uses PR to become a famous hoofer.
emulate - copy a bird dead (Hmm... this one doesn't really work, but I'm having fun.)

Okay... this is all a bit harder than it seemed at first.

emulate - successfully rival a bird left devoured. Nope, not going well. I wonder if I could somehow incorporate the word port, as in the left side of a ship.

Bird left and dined. No, now I'm missing the vital clue as to the entire meaning the answer.
Wait a minute... Rival bird left and dined. I like that.

Let's try another one.

sourdough - spiteful Doug initially has bread. That might work. I'll have to reread the chapters on types of clues and on the use of uppercase letters in a clue.

kith - friends help with a set of tools

A search of Macquarie Dictionary surprised me on this one. I thought 'kith and kin' meant family, but it turns out kith means acquaintances or friends and only the word kin means relatives.

Now, just as I'm about the stop writing here, I've noticed the word beet blutacked to my wall. What about that one? Bee has a drink.
But how do I work in the overall meaning of beet?
Et means and in Latin.
Or I could make it a container clue (page 115 of Astle's book) with bet containing the letter e.

No, I must make myself stop right now and get back to reading the book.

Cryptic crosswords as food for the brain

A friend bought me a copy of David Astle's new book, Rewording the Brain and I'm loving it.

It's written in three sections. Part One discusses the value of puzzling for maintaining brain function. Part Two is an examination of the main types of clues we could expect in a cryptic puzzle. Part Three is a selection of puzzles with ascending levels of difficulty plus assistance in solving them.

I'm particularly grateful for the section at the end of the book with solutions and an explanation for each as to how the answers were achieved.

For years I've been enjoying cryptics in our local newspapers, but don't usually attempt David Astle's puzzles because I thought they would be too difficult for me. Perhaps after working my way through the fifty examples in this book I'll be brave enough to attempt his weekly one.

in his book David Astle mentions The Big Issue, our local street magazine. The Big Issue has a cryptic crossword each fortnight, and the puzzle is always accompanied by a 'straight' version, so you can look across at the ordinary clue if the cryptic one has you puzzled.

incunabula

I've been reading The Diary of a Bookseller.

Yes, I do realise this is an awful photo of the book cover, but it's the best I was willing to do, given my poor photography skills.

It's a fun read, but also informative. I'll be careful next time I bother a bookseller by entering his or her shop to browse. (It's a bit like primary schools. They're great places to teach, but it's quite bothersome that children arrive most days and expect to get some of your attention.)

The author being a bookseller, I'd expect him to have a good vocabulary, so I wasn't surprised to come across words I hadn't heard before. One was incunabula, on page 126 of the edition I read. Shaun Bythell, the bookseller, says that when he's driving to assess a collection of books offered for sale, he's pleasantly excited at the prospect of finding, amongst other things, incunabula.

Often I can guess a meaning by having seen similar words, but this one had me tossed. What could he be expecting to find?

Britannica made it clear to me. It means books printed by machine before the end of the fifteenth century.

Wow! To an Australian this seems incredible. Imagine holding a book that was six hundred years old.

I do remember, as a child, having the privilege of browsing the basement of the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute Library and touching a book published before Europeans 'discovered' this continent. I forget what the actual book was, but the emotional response is still with me. Wonder. Awe.

I think the books I saw that day are now in the State Library of Victoria, but I'm not sure.

beseech and beseek

Yesterday's cryptic crossword clue was: Begged Hugo Best to reform.

Okay, I could get that, especially with the help of Andy's Anagram Solver. 

The answer was besought.

I don't believe I've ever before come across this verb in the past tense. It occurred to me it sounded as if it should be the past tense of beseek, as in the similar verb seek - sought - have sought.

There's no verb beseek, as far as my sketchy research could discover.

Beseech does come from the same old word as seek, though. The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

c. 1200, bisecen "to entreat, beg urgently," from Old English besecan; see be- + seek. "in contrast to the simple vb., in which the northern seek has displaced the southern seech, in the compound beseech has become the standard form" [OED]. Cognate with Old Frisian biseka, Dutch bezoeken, Old High German bisuochan. German cognate besuchen is merely "to visit". Related: Besought (OED writes that beseeched is "now regarded as incorrect"); beseeching. 

I'd still say beseeched. I must check out an Australian Dictionary. I'll try Macquarie...

Yes, Macquarie in 2017 still gives it as an alternative. 

verb (t) (besought or beseeched, beseeching)
1. to implore urgently.
2. to beg eagerly for: solicit.

Interestingly, the Australian dictionary gives it as a transitive verb, but both Miriam-Webster and Dictionary.com say it can also be used intransitively, and Dictionary.com gives this example: Earnestly I did I beseech, but to no avail. 

No, I can't imagine myself using it as an intransitive verb, and a moderately determined internet search didn't find any such usages. (Is 15 minutes of lounging around at my computer to check out a couple of sites a 'determined' search?)

Oh well, off to bed to dream about words.

Walking the streets in fits and starts

My dog Penny and I set off briskly. After all, we hadn't had breakfast yet, but given the prediction of a hot day, we were trying to beat the heat. What was this? Oh yes, an interesting tree to sniff, and grass that might contain some recent pee-mails by local dogs.

We proceeded. And stopped again. Lamp-posts are always fascinating.

And so it  went, around the streets.

This surely must be the definition of  a walk that proceeds in fits and starts. Literally.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition defines this phrase as with irregular bursts of activity.

Yep. That's how it went.

The Word Detective looks at the phrase in some depth. In part, he says:

"Fits and starts" does indeed mean "intermittent" or "off and on, spasmodically, not making  steady progress."

Spot on!

The writer explains that the expression 'by starts' probably appeared around 1421, and the expression 'by fits' can be dated to 1583. Joining the two is described as a more-is-better model, like similarly redundant phrases such as 'in leaps and bounds.'

Once I had mentioned to Penny that breakfast awaited us in the kitchen, the pace picked up amazingly. Vertical surfaces lost their appeal. We raced home.

Deans as leaders of a group of ten

I am reading a book by Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict, A Spirituality for the 21st Century.

I find it interesting that a manual written many hundreds of years ago has so much to tell us about how to live a measured life. Joan Chittister's commentary explains how we can learn from Benedict's wisdom.

The idea is to read one section each day, but I've fallen behind and today arrived at the entry for February 26, where I  noticed this:

If the community is rather large, some chosen for their good repute and holy life should be made deans. They will take care of their groups of ten...

Whoa, I said to myself - 'groups of ten.' Hmm...dean does seem to have some resemblance to the Greek word for 'ten, or the Latin word.

So I looked it up in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and bingo! It means someone who has charge of ten people.

dean (n.)early 14c., from Old French deien (12c., Modern French doyen), from Late Latin decanus "head of a group of 10 monks in a monastery," from earlier secular meaning "commander of 10 soldiers" (which was extended to civil administrators in the late empire), from Greek dekanos, from deka "ten" (from PIE root *dekm- "ten"). Replaced Old English teoðingealdor. College sense is from 1570s (in Latin from late 13c.).

The Persian Language

I was in a shop today where two women were taking dressmaking measurements of a young girl's body and the one with the tape measure was calling the numbers to the woman who was writing them down. I was fascinated by the lovely sound of the words and tried to figure out what language group their speech might belong to. I couldn't hear anything that sounded like any numbers I know.

Of course, I had to ask. It was Farsi. On this site I've just linked to, I read

Farsi, also known as Persian Language, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European Languages. 

What an interesting place my city is, where I can hear such a variety of languages!

One of the women obliged me by counting to ten in Farsi, which I thought was very kind of her. Here's a link to a list of those numbers.

when sadness is heavy upon our soul

The word sadiron landed in my inbox today as my daily mail from A Word a Day. The meaning of the word is

noun: a heavy flatiron pointed at both ends and having a detachable handle. And the etymology is 'From sad (obsolete senses of the word: heavy, solid) + iron Earliest documented use: 1759.

When I'm sad I do feel heavy, in every limb, so I can understand how this word came to have such a meaning.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

sad (adj.) Old English saed "sated, full, having had one's fill (of food, drink, fighting, etc.), weary of," [and gives further detail in the full description of this word's history.] Sense development passed through the meaning "heavy, ponderous" (i.e. "full" mentally or physically), and "weary, tired of" before emerging c. 1300 as "unhappy." An alternative course would be through the common Middle English sense of "steadfast, firmly established, fixed" (as in sad-ware "tough pewter vessels") and "serious" to "grave". In the main modern sense, it replaced Old English unrot, negative of rot "cheerful, glad." 

I wonder what other utensils are sad? Surely it's not just the irons and pewter vessels.

At Words, Words, Words, the writer of the blog writes more about this history, and ends with this:

But one thing that people don't know about sadness is that it is silent. You can't spot it from a mile away, it could be right next to you as you read this. But it is not the be all and end all, you can overcome sadness, but first you have to be able to see it.

I agree. We need to keep our radar scanning for sad people around us, and also to check inside ourselves to see if we are dealing with our own sadness.